Review Reviewed Work(s): From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds by Dennett, Daniel C. Review by: Ronald de Sousa Source: Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture, Vol. 2, No. 1 (Spring 2018), pp. 113- 116 Published by: Academic Studies Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.26613/esic.2.1.80 Accessed: 03-07-2018 18:47 UTC JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://about.jstor.org/terms Academic Studies Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture This content downloaded from 134.124.28.17 on Tue, 03 Jul 2018 18:47:22 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms ESIC 2018 DOI: 10.26613/esic/2.1.80 Dennett, Daniel C. 2017. From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds. New York: W. W. Norton. xviii, 496 pages. Hardback $28.95; Kindle Edition $14.14. Ronald de Sousa Over close to half a century, Daniel Dennett bottom up, from natural selection, without has been the model of a scientifically informed benefit of intelligence. philosopher exploring the mind as a product That way of talking plays a crucial role in of evolution. His latest book is a magisterial Dennett’s overarching project. It prepares the summa: he is “going for the whole story this reader for the insight that even in our most time” (16). intelligent performances, we make use of The key to Dennett’s reconstruction of our competences that we don’t understand and species’ progress to its unique form of intelli- have no need to understand. Even a Bach, in gence is the concept of competence without com- his most explicitly intelligent contrivances, prehension. Every living thing—from bacteria to will have relied not only on others’ crafts, but Bach—persists and reproduces by dint of clever also on innumerable subpersonal routines. tricks. At first, all of these tricks are performed Such routines enable each of us, for example, without comprehension. That is Darwin’s “inver- effortlessly to perform each explicit step in a sion” of the commonsense assumption that chain of conscious reasoning, such as writing competence derives from comprehension. down the result of an arithmetical operation. Only after millions of years of such mindless When we realize that our free and creative use competence has this process culminated in the of language involves competences we had no appearance of creators like Bach, whose top- part in fashioning, we should the more readily down designs are based on a rich understanding concede that the difference between fully inten- of what he wanted and how to achieve it. And tional conscious design and uncomprehending thanks to a second “inversion,” this time from competences is a matter of degree. Alan Turing, human engineers have constructed The key role of competence without com- machines whose increasingly stunning compe- prehension extends to the evolution of culture. tences, in their turn, require no comprehension. To illustrate this, Dennett makes use of Peter Dennett boldly insists that the products of Godfrey-Smith’s neat concept of “Darwinian natural selection literally embody design, just spaces,” a convenient way to represent the not the kind that required a designer. Many bearing of parameters that complement and Darwinians deplore such unqualified use of refine Darwinism’s standard triad of variation, teleological language in reference to biological heredity, and differential reproduction. In functions, fearing that it might give comfort to one such space, the 0,0,0 corner is inhabited the “intelligent design” crowd. Actually, how- by purely Darwinian processes, involving ever, it pulls the rug from under them. Indeed! zero comprehension, bottom-up design, and Dennett can calmly assert, the biosphere is rich random rather than directed search. At the oppo- with marvels of adaptation! They are due to the site corner lies the ideal conscious design, scor- demonstrable reality of competences that result, ing a maximal 1 in comprehension, top-down This content downloaded from 134.124.28.17 on Tue, 03 Jul 2018 18:47:22 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Ronald de Sousa conception, and consciously directed search. In to many critics, a more significant defect is practice, all “real cultural phenomena occupy the term’s vagueness. A meme can be almost the middle ground, involving imperfect compre- anything: a phoneme, a word, a dance, a hension, imperfect search, and much middling cultural practice. The extent to which memes collaboration” (144). Figure 7.5, on which the are replicable, some protest, varies far too much sentence just quoted is a comment, doesn’t actu- to sustain the analogy with genes. ally have a dimension of collaboration. Implicitly, For Dennett, however, that is not a problem. then, the comment equates a high reliance on In digital systems of representation, every sign collaboration with “bottom-up” construction. is identified as one element or another from a Why that might seem reasonable is not explored finite set. None is ever anything in between. until the last chapter; so perhaps we can take this So fidelity in replication is indeed a crucial as an illustration of Dennett’s own concept of a feature of such systems. But digitality itself thinko—the semantic analogue of a typo (225). admits of degrees. As Dennett notes, “hear- The thinko doesn’t affect the main point about say—stenography—vinyl records—DNA— culture, which is that it will never, any more than digital file” form a continuum of increasingly individual consciousness, attain a perfect score accurate replicability (135). Degrees of fidelity on any of those dimensions: affect the durability of cultural practices, but lower degrees can also be useful. Words are at Human culture started out profoundly the very high end. They are truly digital. Most Darwinian, with uncomprehending compe- importantly, words form, once we start to use tences generating various valuable structures and reflect on them critically, the essential in roughly the way termites build their castles. “cranes” that lift us, in a cascade of metalevel Over the next few hundred thousand years, questions, ever higher into the dimension of cultural exploration of Design Space gradually comprehension. de-Darwinized … becoming a process com- Although Dennett’s championing of the posed of ever more comprehension. (282–83) concept of meme has met with a good deal of The main instrument of that process of “de- resistance, what many have found most baffling Darwinization,” lifting us from the Darwinian is his view of consciousness as “user illusion.” base towards full top-down comprehen- If consciousness is an illusion, who is being sion-based design, was the spread of memes. deceived? This is where the pull of “Cartesian “Memes” refers to cultural “ways” that “go viral” gravity” is strongest: surely I can be deceived among human minds, bringing Darwinian only if I am the conscious subject of my illusion! mechanisms into the heart of culture. That has On this, Dennett has plausibly been sus- made them seem threatening to the vaunted pected of mischievous teasing. Actually, autonomous creative capacities of intelligent however, he nowhere denies the existence of humans. The threat is real, in part: the spread of experience. His point is rather that, like the memes, like that of genes, isn’t necessarily good computer display that grounds the “user illu- for their hosts. In the service of their own prop- sion” metaphor, my experience provides almost agation, genes can be deleterious to their carri- no clue to the mechanisms that give rise to it. As ers. Similarly, a meme’s aptitude to grip onto the elaborate description of the role of compe- human minds is only weakly related to epis- tences without comprehension has shown, our temic, moral, or aesthetic standards we profess. own thinking in some ways resembles GOFAI As an objection to memes, the demotion of (Good Old-Fashioned Artificial Intelligence) human creativity they appear to entail is feeble. programs written in a high-level language. It amounts to little more than the expostulation It makes constant use of routines and subrou- that “it would be too sad if it were true.” But tines of which we know and care about only 114 Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture This content downloaded from 134.124.28.17 on Tue, 03 Jul 2018 18:47:22 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Daniel C. Dennet. From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds the outcome—the content of the user illusion: of the concept of zombies, you can imagine a “Our access to our own thinking, and especially being convinced that it is seeing blue yet lack- to the causation and dynamics of its subpersonal ing the quale that is either the cause or the epi- parts, is really no better than our access to our phenomenal object of that conviction. But if digestive processes” (346). If comprehension, this possibility is admitted, then how can you directed search, and top-down design admit of be sure you are not a zombie? degrees, then so does the consciousness that is “But I know that I am not a zombie!” No, you constituted by those mental activities. don’t. The only support for that conviction is Thus primed, we are less likely to believe the vehemence of the conviction itself, and as that consciousness is an all-or-nothing affair, soon as you allow the theoretical possibility with which some creatures are endowed, but that there could be zombies, you have to give others not.